Questions from journalist working on book proposal

[jsingal]

Hi everyone,

I recently left The Boston Globe, where I was an opinion writer, to start work on a book proposal about robots. I plan on covering many areas, but definitely want to devote a good chunk of the proposal to sex robots. (At the moment, most of my knowledge of and interest in the subject comes from David Levy's excellent book "Love and Sex With Robots.")

I'm brand new to this community and certainly want to learn more about you, its members, but as a first step I need to identify where the industry currently stands. Any thoughts would be much appreciated and extremely helpful -- feel free to direct them to either this thread or my email, which is jesse dot singal at gmail dot com. I'm mostly looking to get a sense of which are the most promising companies and researchers. Is there a consensus, or is this an area that's subject to debate? And is Japan still the ultimate nexus for this sort of research, or are there promising American or EU companies and researchers? Have there been any notable recent breakthroughs that I should be aware of? Any controversial, snake-oil-salesmen villain types?

Hopefully you guys will forgive my rather basic questions, because I'm curious to get folks' thoughts.

Best,
Jesse Singal

[jsingal]

Excellent! Thanks so much for a very helpful response. I shall return when I have done enough research to ask more specific, intelligent questions.

And if anyone else has further thoughts, they would be very much appreciated.

[--NightBattery--]

.>.
robotman...the diplomat